When something in the social mediasphere reaches people like my own *mother*, you know its penetrated the public consciousness.  Of sorts.  Yes, I am referring to the lawsuit leveled against Marc “I turned down a billion dollars” Zuckerburg for allegedly stealing the idea for Facebook, while he was doing some contract coding at Harvard for would-be-Facebook/Facebook wannabe ConnectU.

Which leads me to ask the question — can you really copyright a particular flavour of social networking?

I mean, there are a lot of other aspects to the lawsuit, including “breach of actual or implied contract, misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of fiduciary duty, unjust enrichment, unfair business practices, intentional interference with prospective business advantage, breach of duty of good faith and fair dealing, fraud and breach of confidence”.

But really — can you copyright “social networking, but with students?”

Granted, I have non-existent legal knowledge, but doesn’t something have to merit some kind of minimum standard of originality to ensure copyright?  While these standards may be actually low (according to Wikipedia, anyway), to think that some flavour of social networking constitutes “original” is actually a little absurd.

I think the outcome of this lawsuitis interesting, if for no other reason than that it might establish precedent for future lawsuits against established social networks — and who knows who will pop out of the wood work claiming that they had the first “social networking site for business contacts” (linkedin.com), “social networking site for high school students” (myspace.com), or even a “social networking site for families” (geni.com)?